Presently, standard firewalls have preset connection tear-down times. Basically, a timer is initiated when a network connection is started (or passed) and, when that timer “expires”, the network connection is torn down (or closed). This teardown process occurs regardless of the current usage of the connection. For example, an application can be in the middle of transferring/receiving data through the connection and the firewall will still tear the connection down. Accordingly, this has a significant negative impact on any application or service using the connection at the time of the teardown.
The most common problem, particularly when using connection pools, is that a pool will allow stale connections (or soon to be stale connections) to be used by applications, since the connection pool is not aware that the firewall has torn down or will eminently teardown the connection(s). This results in unnecessary connection retries at the application layer, slower response times for applications, and may potentially result in failed transactions or web requests. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems in the art.